Dead Rising 3: An Example of an Industry Killing Itself

Dead Rising 3, revealed at Monday's Microsoft conference as an Xbone exclusive title, is apparently now becoming a stereotypical case of exactly what is wrong with the modern AAA Gaemz Industree™.

The Dead Rising franchise debuted on the Xbox 360 as a mid-tier arcade-like experience that was built around the simple fun of running around a mall and slaughtering as many zombies as possible with as many objects as possible. There wasn't any real cinematic flair and they weren't trying to make an epic blockbuster, they simply stuck to the tried and true concept of making something that was easy to jump into and have alot of instant fun.

As a mid-tier title Dead Rising was a surprise breakout in the early days of the 360 and was a great game to keep players engaged during the wait before the release of Gears of War. Capcom actually seemed to have their head on straight during this period and scored some decent acclaim and sales on not-quite-AAA titles like Dead Rising and Lost Planet while they worked behind the scenes on their blockbusters like Resident Evil 5.

But as the console generation continued on Capcom seemed to slowly and publicly lose their minds, focusing on trying to turn their mid-tier franchises into massive AAA projects, even when the properties displayed no evidence of having appeal on the levels of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. One example is Lost Planet 2, a game they spent way more money on than they should have, a game whose features got homogenized to copy all the leading third person shooters on the market, and a game whose reception was less than stellar and which became an afterthought even though the first game had been a solid cult hit. 

Devil May Cry was another franchise Capcom damaged by focusing on all the wrong things and expecting to sell more than what was reasonable. Stating before the release of Devil May Cry 4 that they wanted to sell 5 million units (a feat in that genre only achieved by God of War II), they seemed disappointed when the game dropped well below that target in spite of the fact that it was the best-selling game in franchise history and showed an upward trend in the series' popularity over the previous installments. Their later response to try and westernize the 5th game by farming it out to Ninja Theory in order to "westernize" the IP and sell even more resulted in a crash in the popularity of the franchise.

As Capcom struggled more and more to stay in everyone's good graces as the quality of their games output steadily declined, they released the multiplatform Dead Rising 2 which debuted on the PS3 and PC as well as the Xbox 360. By all accounts it should have done much better, seeing as it was the sequel to a cult hit, it was releasing on more platforms than the first game and it boasted a more impressive production value and feature set. But the game tanked. Even in multiplatform status it couldn't outdo the sales or the mindshare of the the original Dead Rising and it ended up as another checkmark in a string of failures for Capcom.

So it is with that in mind that I was actually stunned to read this today in regards to the newly announced Dead Rising 3:

"Capcom is pointedly trying to appeal to a wider audience in this latest iteration, saying it's going after the Call of Duty player. Gone is the cartoonish visual design, replaced by a more "realistic" interpretation of a viral apocalypse. That change is part of the maturation. By shifting the art style, the combat can be "more visceral" than in previous versions, with "real gore.""

The above quote came from an article published by Gamespot and it has all the classic alarm points of how the games industry loses it's focus on making fun games and instead begins to travel the path of over-spending and over-extending their expectations into unreasonable realms, thinking that something will sell simply because they spent a great deal of money trying to force it to become the next AAA blockbuster. They think that by making the game look more like Call of Duty it will sell like Call of Duty, seeming to not notice that the more powerful EA has been pursuing Call of Duty relentlessly for years and failing to overtake them because the Call of Duty player wants to play Call of Duty and not a knockoff derivative.

This sort of thinking is a problem across the games industry and why so many of the larger publishers are struggling financially. When you hear Square-Enix complain that 3.5 million units of Tomb Raider selling wasn't enough, even though it was the best selling Tomb Raider of the last decade, you can see the sickness is running deep. Now it's apparent from Capcom's statements on Dead Rising 3 that they are falling into the trap yet again, trying to turn a middle tier B grade franchise which showed decline in popularity, into a massively bloated and expensive gamble. Instead on simply trying to recpature the Dead Rising audience, which is far more realistic for a game such as this, they're now aiming for the stars and will likely fail.